Aurora-Trinity: A Super-Light Client for Distributed Ledger Networks Extending the Ethereum Trinity Client

Abstract

Light clients for distributed ledger networks can verify blockchain integrity by downloading and analyzing blockchain headers. They are designed to circumvent the high resource requirements, i.e., the large bandwidth and memory requirements that full nodes must meet, which are unsuitable for consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices. Light clients rely on full nodes and trust them implicitly. This leaves them vulnerable to various types of attacks, ranging from accepting maliciously forged data to Eclipse attacks. We introduce Aurora-Trinity, a novel version of light clients that addresses the above-mentioned vulnerability by relying on our original Aurora module, which extends the Ethereum Trinity client. The Aurora module efficiently discovers the presence of malicious or Byzantine nodes in distributed ledger networks with a predefined and acceptable error rate and identifies at least one honest node for persistent or ephemeral communication. The identified honest node is used to detect the latest canonical chain head or to infer the state of an entry in the ledger without downloading the header chain, making the Aurora-Trinity client extremely efficient. It can run on consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices, as the Aurora module consumes about 0.31 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage at runtime.

Keywords

• scalability
• decentralization
• light client
• blockchain
• trustless
• Internet of Things